School Of Seven Bells

Fuzzed-out, rhythmically expansive and possessing heavenly harmonies, the Brooklyn trio School of Seven Bells creates vaguely psychedelic, partly electronic pop as trippy and gratifying as a good night of dreaming. It's also worth waking up for. Begun as a side note in 2004 by Benjamin Curtis (then of Secret Machines) and the sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza (then of On! Air! Library!), the project soon blossomed into a priority (they all quit their previous bands). A 2007 single for the experimental label Table of the Elements was followed by early support from kindred spirits Prefuse 73's Scott Herren and Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie. Their 2008 debut album, Alpinisms, and subsequent release, 2010's Disconnect From Desire, reveal an even more polished Technicolor studio vision -- shoegazer guitars set on stun, a global palette of tonalities, a mixture of live and programmed beats -- without ever losing the band's seemingly inherent sense of tunefulness. The School can sound like Animal Collective lullabies, updated Sinead O'Connor epics or Peter Gabriel's pan-global surges: always hummable, rarely humble.